IF 20|21

Roughly 1,500 years after Augustine’s encounter, Chris Marker stirringly portrayed
Soviet master filmmaker Aleksandr Medvedkin in The Last Bolshevik and
reported how the young Medvedkin joyously cried upon first discovering how
placing two images together could produce a third meaning.
Medvedkin shed his tears of wonder at approximately the same moment in history
when people all over the world started escaping into the darkness of movie
palaces en masse – millions cried in front of the silver screen and continue to do
so to this day. Perhaps the technology of exhibiting moving images on big public
screens never really drove any Parisians to leave the theater in fear of being run
over by the train arriving at La Ciotat station (by now cinema’s “founding myth”
has been entirely debunked). But the cinema did serve and still serves as a constant
source of wonder – a source of tears and laughter. Hours spent in the darkness
of a movie theater are hours of wonder, while occasionally punctured by an
interval of tedium.
Thanks to Jean-Luc Godard’s iconic close-up of Anna Karina, and Abbas
Kiarostami’s close-up of Juliette Binoche, it is easy to picture the face of
a viewer glistening with tears in the darkened movie theater, illuminated
only by the soft light reflecting off the silver screen. Now imagine the
same face perusing moving images outside the sanctuary of cinema – in
front of YouTube. Instead of a shadowy and sublime image of stillness and
wonder, it is easy to picture the harshly lit face of someone picking their
nose, masturbating, or nervously skipping through hundreds of streams:
hours of tedium, occasionally punctured by an interval of wonder.
“Anyone who has wasted hours surfing the Internet knows that technology can
encourage bad habits,” Ted Chiang laconically remarked in his 2013 story The
Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling. But on the same page, he conceded that the
true benefits of (any) new technologies have yet to be discovered. We can be certain
of one thing: Having experienced two different technological standards only
seems to provide an ideal perspective for evaluation and comparison. It doesn’t.
I am not an authority on the subject compared to someone born into the age of
new technological standards simply because I experienced the widespread migration
from analog to digital cinema and the subsequent widespread migration from
cinema viewing to home streaming.
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Introduction